The Six-Legged Pentathlon mini-games from Squid Game’s second season are explained

This article contains spoilers for “Squid Game” Season 2.

Poor Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae). You’d think that a man trying to bring down the entire Squid Game organization by entering the games for a second time would already have enough on his plate. But even his chance to shine with his knowledge of the game “Sugar Honeycombs” is taken away from him. Gi-hun is convinced that the second game is the all-too-familiar Dalgona candy-shaping game from the first season, and he freely distributes the winning strategy to his competitors. Gi-hun ends up with egg on his face when the organizers mess things up with the game turning out to be a six-legged pentathlon instead.

The game begins with players forming teams of five. The teams’ legs are then tied together so that they have to continue on a total of “six legs”. They are then forced to face a circuit that includes a pentathlon of games that they must complete within a strict time limit – under penalty of death, as is common in this game.

The five games that the teams have to play are, of course, traditional Korean playground games. The first is none other than Ddakji, the infamous envelope-throwing game that Gi-hun plays with the recruiter (Gong Yoo) in Season 1. The second is Flying Stone, where the team has to knock over a small tombstone-like piece by throwing rocks at it. Next comes Gonggi, a grabbing game in which players must pick up small, shaped pebbles using various hand movements (like jacks). The fourth game is a spinning top competition and the fifth is Jegichagi – a type of hacky sack game played with an object resembling a shuttlecock.

The six-legged pentathlon is the second game of the competition and requires heavy lifting when it comes to establishing the participants’ momentum. Without going into too much detail about what happens to the various characters before the game is over, two particularly notable factions soon emerge.

Gi-hun and the frontman (Lee Byung-hun), who poses as player 001 in the games, end up on the same team at his request. They are joined by Gi-hun’s friend Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), Player 388 (Kang Ha-neul) and Player 222 (Jo Yu-ri). Opposed to this comparatively powerful group is a quintet of outcasts who begin to form when other players discriminate against player 120 (Park Sung-hoon) and not accept her into their teams. She is soon joined by Player 007 (Yang Dong-geun) and his mother, Player 149 (Kang Ae-shim), a tag team who also has difficulty securing a spot on other teams due to their advanced age. This high-stakes team is finally completed by Player 095 and the extremely eccentric Player 044.

Given Gi-hun’s experience and animosity towards the frontman, it makes narrative sense to put the two on the same team, mostly made up of capable and determined individuals. It’s also interesting to see how the second season remixes the outcast themes for the viewer remembers the first season of “Squid Game.”. Although Player 120 is a far more likeable character than the scheming Player 212 (Kim Joo-ryoung) in Season 1, both find themselves in the unfortunate role of being ostracized by most teams. Likewise, Player 149 finds that few want to team up with an older candidate, as Player 001 (O Yeong-su) does in Season 1 – even though the characters’ circumstances are very, very different.

The second game in the 33rd Squid Game – also known as the one we saw in Season 1 of Squid Game – forces contestants to choose a specific shape and carve it out of a circle of extremely fragile Dalgona candies. Gi-hun develops the tactic of licking the shape out of the environment, which not only saves his own life but also helps other participants. It’s a pivotal moment in his transition from a self-serving, hapless loser to a more determined figure with truly heroic traits… which is promptly upended when the series celebrates putting Gi-hun under the Dalgona rug in the season to pull away from the feet 2.

Here, Gi-hun speaks loudly about his Dalgona experience and manages to instill hope among the players ahead of the second game. The revelation that he was wrong and that they are actually playing a six-legged pentathlon creates another abrupt twist in his story arc – only this time it goes in the opposite direction. While Gi-hun’s Dalgona exploits in the first season give him confidence and make him a resourceful player for others to look up to, his complete failure to predict the second game of the second season despite claims to the contrary deeply undermines his authority. It’s the kind of clever twist we’ve come to expect the best “Squid Game” episodesand spells a lot of trouble for the character trying to get to the end Seven-episode season 2 of “Squid Game.”which is now streaming on Netflix.